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Nadja Vol Ochs
Microsoft Corporation
June 21, 1999
The following article originally appeared in the MSDN Online Voices "Design Discussion" column.
Recent months have brought new advances in the exchange of high-quality audio digital downloads on the Web. Now, with the Microsoft® Windows Media™ Rights Manager in Windows Media Technologies 4.0, content providers can offer license registration to connect to their customers and charge for digital content download. With the Windows Media Rights Manager, you can encrypt digital media files (such as songs and videos) for transfer over an Internet connection. Customers then acquire a license and a key to decode and play the files. In addition to allowing transfer of media, the Rights Manager enables you to monitor and analyze your Web site activity.
This article will familiarize you with the basic concepts of digital media acquisition and will offer a simple design process scenario for implementing rights management on your site or in your Web application. I will also cover how Broadband.com, SiteSound.com, and Reciprocal.com are using this technology today.
Freshjams is an Microsoft internal sample site project that the Windows Media Rights Management team set up to test and share Windows Media Rights Management company-wide. The project was set up from day one for employees to submit songs and stress test the product. With Freshjams, the design team knew that the site would be available only to internal users, so they did not need to collect the amount of information that a conventional public site would. The team scaled down the license acquisition experience to collect only e-mail addresses from users before enabling them access to a song.
Broadcast.com
has four albums available for download that use digital rights management. Each song requires a license to play it. When you click on a song, you are prompted to enter an e-mail address in order to get the license. One tip: Broadcast.com engineer Jonathan Peters recommends making sure to tell your users to get the latest Windows Media player to view the content. Other players that support Windows Media Rights Management are Winamp and Sonique.
Jonathan tells me that setting up the rights management technology at Broadcast.com is easy. The issues for them surround getting the rights to download and encrypt content. They are considering using this technology for public domain content and other projects in the future.
For those content providers who do not currently want to get involved in the licensing business, Reciprocal.com (an online licensing and clearing company) issues licenses for certain vendors. For example, Launch.com has recently offered a new unreleased Beastie Boys song to the public. Launch.com simply aggregates the content to the end consumers who want the new songs. Then, as users open the file to play the content, they are sent to the proper license acquisition page on Reciprocal.com. Accordingly, Launch and Reciprocal have a business relationship that allows Launch to distribute digitally protected content and leave the issuing of the licenses to Reciprocal. This allows Launch to concentrate on delivering the content itself, rather than having to set up a licensing infrastructure for their design.
I walked through this process, and was surprised at the number of browser windows that the process spawned. I found it a little jarring to be transferred to a different site that was launched in a new browser window, just to start the song. A better system would be for Reciprocal to refer to the content or original Beastie Boys Web site on this page to make a more cohesive experience at the final license approval stage.
If you've developed content and arranged for licensing, you can also consider one additional hurdle to jump: getting payment for the license. This will require additional technology to handle the transaction of credit card payment information. Sightsound.com is currently positioned to have the first external site for collecting payment on licenses of DRM content. They have a Microsoft Commerce Server integration plan in place that allows them to integrate the commerce aspect with the digital rights management through some semi-complex .asp scripts. According to Chad Gibson, Program Manager on the Digital Rights Management (DRM) team, using Sightsound.com is one example of how emerging Internet companies are issuing licenses, but there remain other effective ways to set up a digital rights management system. Here is a quick summary of the Sightsound licensing process:
Windows Media Rights Technology includes a sample site covering a customizable license acquisition scenario (LAS). The LAS is sometimes also known as the license acquisition URL. The sample includes the beginning script required to get you started creating your scenario.
The Windows Media Rights Technology LAS consists simply of a couple of .asp pages that collect basic information from users before the license is issued, including: e-mail address, age, sex, country of origin, and zip code. The sample site also has the configurable option of issuing cookies to identify returning users. That way, if users have previously registered with the sample site, they won't need to enter that information a second time. The server will simply issue them the proper license. And even if the proper cookie is not recognized at the beginning of the license acquisition sequence, the system will recognize a return user when the e-mail address is entered. The technology will simply recognize that the e-mail address has previously been entered and issue a license without prompting the user to complete the other fields (age, sex, country, and zip).
When integrating this technology solution into your site or application designs you might find it helpful to storyboard multiple scenarios that your site might encompass. Here is a simple storyboard I sketched out on a whiteboard for a demo site that our team is working on. The storyboard follows two simple scenarios: asking for the user's name and zip code, and asking for a credit card number.
After you've planned the scenario on a storyboard, the next step is to mock it up using either Photoshop or HTML. Below are images taken from a very simple scenario, which illustrates a simple registration form requiring a zip code from the user and a license confirmation.
Step 1: The user selects a song from a Web interface.
Step 2: Clicking on the song link triggers the player to launch. The player recognizes whether the file is encrypted as a Windows Media Rights Management file and sends a challenge to the server to see if the user has a license and can be identified. If the client does not have a license, then a URL is triggered to start the license acquisition scenario. If the client does have a license then the song begins to play.
Step 3: The player recognizes that a license is required and triggers an HTML page to load in a new window. This page gathers the licensing information from the user. This can be any data you wish to gather from the user at this point, e-mail address, zip code, name, etc. In this sample, I ask the user to register by entering a zip code.
Step 4: The license is generated and delivered. The file is downloaded to the client machine. Then a new Web page loads confirming the license.
Step 5: The user clicks the previous page link to launch the player and listen to the song on that machine only. If the user transfers this downloaded file to another machine, the user is required to obtain another key and register again via the license hosting Web site.
If you are a Web site designer, I suggest that you collaborate with an engineer to map your license acquisition scenario to the technical capabilities of digital rights management. The technology is based on Active Server Pages (ASP) functionality and SQL databases, so it is very flexible and customizable. To fully implement the process, it does require expertise using ASP technology, SQL Server 7.0, and Internet Information Server.
Take a look at Windows Media Technologies 4.0 and consider the possibilities.
Getting Started:
The Windows Media Rights Manager. A FAQ covering rights management in more detail will soon be available off this site.
Rights Manager News Groups:
msnews.microsoft.com news server
microsoft.public.windowsmedia.technologies.rightsmanager.beta
Windows Media Rights Manager:
Download the Windows Media Rights Manager.
Windows Media Rights Manager is available for Windows NT® Server 4.0 with Service Pack 4.
This download includes the entire Windows Media Rights Manager, including the Windows Media License Manager and the Windows Media Packager. In order for Windows Media Packager to function, Windows Media Tools must be installed.
Nadja Vol Ochs is the design consultant in Microsoft's Developer Relations Group.
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